Dream launches online VR collaboration and productivity tool

We&#x27;re super excited to get this out after nearly 3 years of work by our team - we&#x27;ve put together some further thoughts here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@idanbeck&#x2F;announcing-dream-754c0f374da0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@idanbeck&#x2F;announcing-dream-754c0f374da0</a><p>Dream is now available in early access on the Oculus store, so we&#x27;d really appreciate any feedback and thoughts people have. We truly believe that immersive technologies like virtual reality can make remote work and collaboration better than existing 2D form factors - especially as the new standalone VR headsets like Quest come to fruition in the coming year.<p>Dream has been built entirely from scratch, so we got to rethink a lot of the stack. We prioritized certain things, like networking and UI, and we&#x27;re really proud of the outcome. Doing so also meant it took us a lot longer to bring a product to release, since there was a lot more to do - but it allowed us to integrate WebRTC at the native level as well as chromium (by way of CEF) so we can do things like bring up our keyboard when a user hits a text field.<p>Hope people like it, and want to say thanks to everyone that made it possible!

Watching the video I was struck by my own experience of creating a virtual art gallery (of real world photography and 3D renders) in Second Life.<p>It felt really amazing when I was alerted by a sensor in the gallery that someone was visiting it and I could teleport back to the gallery to meet them. Their location in the virtual space (which pictures they were stood in front of) said something about the pictures that they liked. I could read something about their personas from the avatar they were using (especially in conjunction with other scanning tools). My own little gallery was just one of many and other organisations and groups created much more impressive interactive environments (admittedly a lot of them seemed to be for various forms of role-play, some very unsavoury).<p>The promo video shows the participants in effect in a completely conventional conference room - one screen and chairs around a table. The wider space doesn&#x27;t seem to contribute functionally at all - it&#x27;s a pretty backdrop but doesn&#x27;t display more info that contributes to the meeting. So I&#x27;m curious - could this sort of capability be used to create more dynamic interactions - or are we limited by the tech (tethered interaction by seated people) to more constrained situations? (please don&#x27;t get me wrong - I&#x27;m supportive of the concept - but I&#x27;m encountering pushback from colleagues and customers who don&#x27;t see the potential)

I work in finance and talked to somebody who implemented a Bloomberg terminal wall in VR. This would be a great application for VR since you never can have enough Bloomberg terminals open and usually never have enough screen space.<p>However he told me that VR can not be used for anything productive right now because of many problems. One thing is, only very few people can wear a VR headpiece for 8 to 10 hours straight without getting serious headaches and dizziness. The resolution has to at least be one order of magnitude higher for meaningful sized fonts being properly readable. The head pieces have to be one order of magnitude lighter. If you want to do more than a 2D wall displayed like a canvas in 3D you have to solve the problem that your eyes automatically try to focus differently on different depths which is also one major source of headache.<p>All in all I was convinced by him that the VR technology is at least 2 generations behind what you would need for serious work. Until then all kinds of software, SDKs and Hardware will change dramatically. Hence investing in VR productivity software development right now is a complete waste of time and money.

I&#x27;m sorry, what&#x27;s the value added here? In the demo video (in vimeo) the team is going over some work tasks in Trello. Considering the bad HMD resolution and general clumsiness of doing things such as typing, I&#x27;m really unsure as to what is the value added of doing a meeting in Dream VR session as opposed to just regulard desktop&#x2F;webex type of thing with possibly desktop sharing and voice&#x2F;video conf. I work extensively with VR and I have a hard time seeing the catch here. Thanks!

How possible is it for users to have haptic gloves for typing instead of using controllers? I remain positive on VR productivity tools in future but think we have to get flexible and creative on hardware. Personally, I would love to have collaborative meetings with my colleagues worldwide, even just to demo my modelling ideas on a whiteboard which I think would be tremendously helpful (I believe FB keynote last year also voiced the same sentiment). I fully agree with the hardware limitations at the moment but certainly don&#x27;t think investment and work now is a waste of time. To push this area forward, we also need to find compelling experiences that are unique to VR, like remote presentation rehearsal, collaborative white board brainstorming sessions for 3D design etc. Wearing a VR headset to work 8 to 10 hours straight is not the answer I look forward to, at least not for now. What VR is strong about to me todate are: minimising limitations resulted from physical distances and fading memories of past experience, as well as its ability to create limitless imaginary worlds, boosting multi-dimensional communication.

Name collision is unfortunate, thought this was related to Google Daydream at first, since it uses Google Chrome to access VR.<p>How is this different than BigScreen? It allows people to view computer screens (video games, browsers, movies) in VR with other people.<p>Edit: saw that you answered the bigscreen question earlier.

Isnt resolution the big killer for all of these applications? Even in the video Trello looked really blurry, i can only imagine what it would look with the Rift instead of an Vive Pro for example.